Integrating 2D Mouse Emulation with 3D Manipulation for Visualizations on a Multi-Touch Table

We present the Rizzo, a multi-touch virtual mouse that has been designed to provide the fine grained interaction for information visualization on a multi-touch table. Our solution enables touch interaction for existing mouse-based visualizations. Previously, this transition to a multi-touch environment was difficult because the mouse emulation of touch surfaces is often insufficient to provide full information visualization functionality. We present a unified design, combining many Rizzos that have been designed not only to provide mouse capabilities but also to act as zoomable lenses that make precise information access feasible. The Rizzos and the information visualizations all exist within a touch-enabled 3D window management system. Our approach permits touch interaction with both the 3D windowing environment as well as with the contents of the individual windows contained therein. We describe an implementation of our technique that augments the VisLink 3D visualization environment to demonstrate how to enable multi-touch capabilities on all visualizations written with the popular prefuse visualization toolkit.

Tabletop games using real environment and physical simulation

International audienceThe recent widespread of RGBD cameras such as Kinect device from Microsoft opens many new interaction metaphors available to the general public. In this poster we introduce a tabletop interaction metaphor using the depth map from the Kinect: each element on the table is included as a set of physical constraints in a virtual environment. We briefly discuss visualization methods and present a gaming genre adapted to this framework : action-construction games

Toward an intelligent multimodal interface for natural interaction

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-76).Advances in technology are enabling novel approaches to human-computer interaction (HCI) in a wide variety of devices and settings (e.g., the Microsoft® Surface, the Nintendo® Wii, iPhone®, etc.). While many of these devices have been commercially successful, the use of multimodal interaction technology is still not well understood from a more principled system design or cognitive science perspective. The long-term goal of our research is to build an intelligent multimodal interface for natural interaction that can serve as a testbed for enabling the formulation of a more principled system design framework for multimodal HCI. This thesis focuses on the gesture input modality. Using a new hand tracking technology capable of tracking 3D hand postures in real-time, we developed a recognition system for continuous natural gestures. By nature gestures, we mean the ones encountered in spontaneous interaction, rather than a set of artificial gestures designed for the convenience of recognition. To date we have achieved 96% accuracy on isolated gesture recognition, and 74% correct rate on continuous gesture recognition with data from different users and twelve gesture classes. We are able to connect the gesture recognition system with Google Earth, enabling gestural control of a 3D map. In particular, users can do 3D tilting of the map using non touch-based gesture which is more intuitive than touch-based ones. We also did an exploratory user study to observe natural behavior under a urban search and rescue scenario with a large tabletop display. The qualitative results from the study provides us with good starting points for understanding how users naturally gesture, and how to integrate different modalities. This thesis has set the stage for further development towards our long-term goal.by Ying Yin.S.M

Exploring the Multi-touch Interaction Design Space for 3D Virtual Objects to Support Procedural Training Tasks

Multi-touch interaction has the potential to be an important input method for realistic training in 3D environments. However, multi-touch interaction has not been explored much in 3D tasks, especially when trying to leverage realistic, real-world interaction paradigms. A systematic inquiry into what realistic gestures look like for 3D environments is required to understand how users translate real-world motions to multi-touch motions. Once those gestures are defined, it is important to see how we can leverage those gestures to enhance training tasks. In order to explore the interaction design space for 3D virtual objects, we began by conducting our first study exploring user-defined gestures. From this work we identified a taxonomy and design guidelines for 3D multi-touch gestures and how perspective view plays a role in the chosen gesture. We also identified a desire to use pressure on capacitive touch screens. Since the best way to implement pressure still required some investigation, our second study evaluated two different pressure estimation techniques in two different scenarios. Once we had a taxonomy of gestures we wanted to examine whether implementing these realistic multi-touch interactions in a training environment provided training benefits. Our third study compared multi-touch interaction to standard 2D mouse interaction and to actual physical training and found that multi-touch interaction performed better than 2D mouse and as well as physical training. This study showed us that multi-touch training using a realistic gesture set can perform as well as training on the actual apparatus. One limitation of the first training study was that the user had constrained perspective to allow for us to focus on isolating the gestures. Since users can change their perspective in a real life training scenario and therefore gain spatial knowledge of components, we wanted to see if allowing users to alter their perspective helped or hindered training. Our final study compared training with Unconstrained multi-touch interaction, Constrained multi-touch interaction, or training on the actual physical apparatus. Results show that the Unconstrained multi-touch interaction and the Physical groups had significantly better performance scores than the Constrained multi-touch interaction group, with no significant difference between the Unconstrained multi-touch and Physical groups. Our results demonstrate that allowing users more freedom to manipulate objects as they would in the real world benefits training. In addition to the research already performed, we propose several avenues for future research into the interaction design space for 3D virtual objects that we believe will be of value to researchers and designers of 3D multi-touch training environments

3D-Modellierung mit interaktiven Oberflächen

3D models are at the core of many important applications from industry, science, and also entertainment. The creation of 3D models is a complex and time consuming process. Current modeling tools are hard to learn and require a deep understanding of the underlying mathematical models. Furthermore, established input devices like the mouse and keyboard do not utilize the full interaction potential -- especially regarding bimanual control -- of the human hand. The growing interest and the commercial breakthrough of multi-touch displays and interactive surfaces raises questions about their potential in the context of 3d modeling, which are thoroughly discussed and evaluated in this work. The presented approach is closely aligned to the whole processing chain for multi-touch applications, starting with the hardware and tracking issues, continuing with fundamental design discussions and operations like selection and 3D manipulation of objects and finishing with complex modeling techniques and metaphors. In regard to hardware and tracking, a robust illumination setup for the diffuse illumination technique is presented along with two extensions of this approach, i.e., hover detection and hand distinction. The design space is organized into specific design dimensions characterized by extremal positions to allow a better overview of design choices and a classification of existing and future systems. Fundamental techniques for selection and integrated 3D manipulation with six degrees of freedom are presented and empirically evaluated. Finally, two established modeling techniques -- implicit surfaces and virtual sculpting -- are extended and evaluated for multi-touch input

Freeform 3D interactions in everyday environments

PhD ThesisPersonal computing is continuously moving away from traditional input using mouse and keyboard, as new input technologies emerge. Recently, natural user interfaces (NUI) have led to interactive systems that are inspired by our physical interactions in the real-world, and focus on enabling dexterous freehand input in 2D or 3D. Another recent trend is Augmented Reality (AR), which follows a similar goal to further reduce the gap between the real and the virtual, but predominately focuses on output, by overlaying virtual information onto a tracked real-world 3D scene. Whilst AR and NUI technologies have been developed for both immersive 3D output as well as seamless 3D input, these have mostly been looked at separately. NUI focuses on sensing the user and enabling new forms of input; AR traditionally focuses on capturing the environment around us and enabling new forms of output that are registered to the real world. The output of NUI systems is mainly presented on a 2D display, while the input technologies for AR experiences, such as data gloves and body-worn motion trackers are often uncomfortable and restricting when interacting in the real world. NUI and AR can be seen as very complimentary, and bringing these two fields together can lead to new user experiences that radically change the way we interact with our everyday environments. The aim of this thesis is to enable real-time, low latency, dexterous input and immersive output without heavily instrumenting the user. The main challenge is to retain and to meaningfully combine the positive qualities that are attributed to both NUI and AR systems. I review work in the intersecting research fields of AR and NUI, and explore freehand 3D interactions with varying degrees of expressiveness, directness and mobility in various physical settings. There a number of technical challenges that arise when designing a mixed NUI/AR system, which I will address is this work: What can we capture, and how? How do we represent the real in the virtual? And how do we physically couple input and output? This is achieved by designing new systems, algorithms, and user experiences that explore the combination of AR and NUI